Meet The Author: Jon Ronson

Monday 9th March 2015 - Starts 8pm

TICKET PRICE: £8

Finished

City Books present award-winning writer and documentary maker Jon Ronson launching his new book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

Jon is the author of many best-selling books, including The Psychopath Test, The Men Who Stare At Goats, Lost At Sea, and Them: Adventures With Extremists. His first fictional screenplay, Frank, co-written with Peter Straughan, was directed by Lenny Abrahamson and starred Michael Fassbender. He lives in London and New York City.

In 2012, Jon Ronson’s online identity was stolen. Jon publicly confronted the imposters, a trio of academics who had created a Jon Ronson Twitter bot obsessed by unlikely food combinations and weird sex. At first, Jon was delighted to find strangers all over the world uniting to support him in his outrage. The wrongdoers were quickly shamed into stopping. But then things got out of hand.

This encounter prompted Jon to explore the phenomenon of public shaming and what he discovered astonished him. As he meets famous shamers and shamees, Jon learns just how quickly public ridicule and vitriol, often delivered from anonymous or distant sources, can devastate its victim. After our collective fury has raged with the force of a hurricane, we forget about it and move on, and it doesn’t cross our minds to wonder what we’ve done. How big a transgression really justifies someone losing their job? What about the people who become global targets for doing nothing more than making a bad joke on Twitter; do they deserve to have their lives ruined? How is this renaissance of public shaming changing the world and what is the true reason behind it?

Simultaneously powerful and hilarious in the way only Jon Ronson can be, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is a timely, sobering, and much-needed examination of the escalating war on human flaws – and our very scary part in it.

This fascinating ‘Meet The Author’ event will feature a reading, talk, Q&A session, plus the chance to purchase signed first edition copies of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed at discount.